The Mac App Store opened 10 years ago

Make of Store celebrates its tenth anniversary today! The store dedicated to the Mac opened its doors on January 6, 2011, one of the new features of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 launched on the same day. Two and a half years after the App Store for the iPhone, Snow Leopard is a shopping experience, simple and perfectly integrated, using the same concept of the app store verified in the upstream integrated.

For the introduction, Apple was able to convince hundreds of developers that then thousands of apps in the store were free and paid. It was welcomed by Steve Jobs, who was CEO for ten days before taking his final sick leave News release :

With over a thousand apps, the Mac App Store is off to a great start. We think people will love this innovative new way to find and buy their favorite apps.

The huge success of the App Store for iOS has raised a lot of confidence for this variant aimed at the Mac. The first few months have confirmed them, with millions of downloads reaching the next day, with more than 4,000 apps in March. Unfortunately, these good starts mark a quick time, and since the summer of 2011, developers have realized that the success of the Mac App Store has nothing to do with the iPhone and iPad Store.

While Apple proudly praised the 100 million downloads achieved at the end of 2011, it is an absurd number compared to the App Store, while reaching 18 billion downloads, a number that has almost doubled. In a year. The trend remains the same: the iOS Store has sustained a crazy growth, while those dedicated to MacOS have stagnated. Needless to say, the Mac App Store has never been the only solution for downloading apps on the Mac.

The App Store has always been more of an option than iOS, and the limitations imposed by Apple have been particularly criticized by some developers. Proper verification, mandatory compliance with sandboxing or lack of demo versions and fee updates are all reviews we have heard for ten years. Despite some trivial offerings that allow the return of certain applications, such as FTP Client Transmit or Code Editor BPEdit a year later at the end of 2018, Apple has not really responded.

Turning the tide is not enough to make the Mac App Store as successful as the original App Store. However, it should be noted that Apple has regained interest in its App Store for MacOS in recent years. Mojave has included the “Discover” section with tips and articles on locally written applications. Catalina added a section to Apple Arcade, Apple’s streaming service. As for Big Zurf, it can now manage iOS apps because they can be installed on Apple Silicon Mac.

While the success may not have been as great as expected, the Mac App Store is now an integral part of the MacOS, thus delivering major computer updates through it. We must not forget that for the majority of users, the process of purchasing and especially installing applications is significantly simplified by this addition to the system.

Also, Apple’s idea has become smaller, as the Microsoft Store was introduced next year with the same concept in Windows 8. Even on the side of GNU / Linux distributions where package managers were pioneers, there are now graphical interfaces as easy to access as the Mac App Store. Coming back to the Mac, we can quote Setup, A service that provides access to dozens of apps for a monthly subscription, designed just like the Apple Store.